2013-15 All Things Budget

Workers in Wisconsin and across the U.S. must still cope with a relatively weak labor market. That is especially challenging for low-wage workers who are struggling with the declining value of the minimum wage, reductions in employer benefits like health care, and growing inequality. Those challenges are exacerbated in Wisconsin by budget decisions made by state lawmakers.

Wisconsin’s 2013-15 budget bill employs a “Robin Hood in reverse” strategy for allocating resources. This issue brief explains ten significant examples of how the new budget shifts funding from the poor to the wealthy.

The budget makes significant changes to public education in Wisconsin, particularly by expanding the voucher program statewide. The budget bill includes a small boost in spending for public schools, but the increase is small enough that schools will continue to lose ground to inflation.

The budget partially closes the current gap in BadgerCare by extending eligibility to all adults below the poverty level who don’t have children, while cutting in half the current income eligibility ceiling for parents and caretakers.

The budget bill assumes that participation in W-2, the work program for unemployed low-income families, will decline by 1% every month. But new data for April and May show that W-2 participation did not decline by 2% during that period; it rose by 6.2%.